Carls_jeep wrote on 06/29/12 at 00:14:37:

Carl, I believe more members are reading this thread that you might think.  As I logged on just now I saw that it has been read 898 times.  Many more are reading than posting.  I agree with Jonathan about the money being there.  I feel that when a decision is made as to how best make the 3A Page come together we will have the donors. I believe that many are just waiting to see how it does comes together before pledging.  I second what you said about pledging and paying up.  I don't think that will be a problem either.  I truly believe that the folks who are drawn to these old American icons that we're driving / restoring are some of the people best America has.  I really mean that.  I have come to know several through the posts, and even quite a few "face to face', all are really great.  We will make it happen and it will be worth it.  And I also second exactly what you said about being a donor of $100 or more does not make a person an owner.  It just makes him someone who is appreciative of sharing fun times and fun projects, learning technical data as well as sharing it, and making great acquaintances.  I have certainly received more than $100 worth of information and enjoyment from the CJ-3A Page.  Long live the 3A Page.

Okay guys, it sounds like most of us are on the same page here... I do have a professional IT guy in mind already. He has been in the background, advising me on what would be the best way to go about this transformation to a member owned site..

Let me introduce our new IT guy and webmaster, David Eilers. Unless someone has a HUGE valid reason not to use Dave, I think he is our man for several reasons. One, he runs, and quite well, eWillys.com, a website that many of us visit daily. (If you have not seen eWillys, go and take a look. ) Two, he has been instrumental in several major businesses involving IT work. Third, he is a stand up guy. I got to really know Dave by reading his book, FINDING VIRGINIA, in fact I read it several times as a proofreader for a later edition.

Dave has volunteered to help us with this transition, and get us hosting and IT services, for one year. He is asking a minimal fee for this, and a portion of any advertising revenue we might generate. We do NOT plan on having anywhere near as much advertising as his site. as we heard loud and clear just how little you guys want to have a bunch of ads clogging things up. Dave will be the guy I go to when the site needs some work or stuff isn't functional. He won't have time to make a whoile lot of new content, altho I am sure he will help out.

Dave and I will be the folks in charge, for now. I guess I will be the head honcho, but  Dave will be a close second. At some point I will need to bring on a third person to take the reins if something happens to me or Dave, as I do not want to make this site dependent on ONE person. Remember what happened with Vernco when he had issues at home? (For those that were not in the loop for that, Vernco and all its good stuff disappeared off the face of the earth, suddenly, and without much explanation. for quite a long time) That stuff, health issues, and life in general happens, and one person's life should not shut down a site like this. I would feel a lot better if there was a third person who knew who hosted the site, where to send the hosting check, etc.. Perhaps there will be a super moderator who will have access to that sort of stuff... I dunno yet.

The way I see this going, is we will switch ownership and hosting, keeping the YABB board until we have enough funds to buy improved board software and pay Dave to install it. That may be fairly soon, or we may decide to do this down the road next year. One thing I do know from my research  was that if we DO keep the YABB board it will really limit what we can do as far as any changes, ads, etc. Transfering threads from the YABB board is very labor intensive, and we don't want to keep adding threads to the obsolete board we will eventually dump for too long.

At the moment we are trying to figure out how to do the donations. If some do not have the ability to do Paypal, we will need some way to handle the checks or money orders.... If nobody has any objection, I can have them sent to me, I will deposit them in my own account , and then send a Paypal payment to the Paypal account we have yet to establish. JR has suggested we just sent the donations to his  CJ3A Paypal Account, which is one option, but we will need to set up a new PP account for the website anyway so David has suggested it will be a more clean transition that way. If you do have access to Paypal, I would far prefer that method of payment.

While we do have more than 200 legit members, if you look at the statistics only about 50 are really active at the moment.  about 50 have not been here in over a year, 50 plus have not seen the page in 60 days, etc. I have signed several folks up who have never visited the board once I signed them up, which confuses me a little bit.  We have one member who signed up to make a post about the jeep parts they were now a dealer in, and they visited once or twice after they did their one post. So a !0 dollar donation from each of whatever the total member ship is probably won't do the trick as I doubt we will see anything from over half of the members.

I plan to start taking actual donations sometime next week, probably after the 4th. I do have some other stuff to do , actually spent a lot of today in the attic repairing insulation problems and I still have a bunch of work to do to my escort truck before I leave next Friday for Colorado.

At some point on Saturday I will put together a list of those I have pledges from and post it, unless there is someone who objects..I will not post the amounts for now except to state the totals.

Thanks again guys and gals (Do we have any gals here??

Bill F.

I agree with fbill on all his thoughts on how the forum should be.


Ive actually made around $400 from selling my misc parts so i believe i actually owe the site at least $50. I tried to post some stuff on the 2a forum but no one was really interested in them since they were 3a. Posted over here and sold them right away.

I agree, Tim, I'd hate to think where I would be with my Jeep now had Bill not suggested that I check out the site. I had been checking out the old 3a site and was not aware of the new one. Mac :exclamation :exclamation :exclamation :exclamation

David,
Thank you for your help, and welcome aboard.  I enjoy eWillys very much.  I only discovered it last year.  Recently, I looked deep into your eWillys pages (2010)  and actually found my Jeep as it was listed on CL.

Thank you again for your help with the 3A page.

Tim

Sorry took me a bit to get to this post, recovering from total left knee replacement but looking forward to getting back to my Willys project!  I'm in as far as contributing, let me know the cost.  Thanks.